[Mono-devel-list] Re: Potential GAC implementation ideas.

[Todd Berman]

> That would be the packager's responsibility, as it is with shared
> libraries on Linux today.

That's the point of the GAC, it isn't the packagers concern anymore.

The packager should be concerned with getting the library to the GAC (if it
even needs to be, a library shouldn't be in the GAC unless two separate
packages need it), not worrying about how to gets there, where it actually
goes, or anything else.

> I'm not really strongly advocating one way or the other, but as someone
> who deals with packaging issues professionally, if adding a DLL to the
> GAC is error prone, doing it in packaging post-install scripts isn't the
> way to do it.  Otherwise, it's probably fine.  It's a tradeoff someone
> has to make... I am just here to inform. :)

I would think that it would be fairly safe, the only potential problem I
could see once the implementation works is if that assembly already exists
in the GAC, in that case, failing is no problem, and if failing was a
problem, force will replace the existing one with yours. And remember,
assembly already existing in the GAC means an assembly with the same name,
version numbers and public token.

--Todd